2020 Southern Festival of Books | Chapter 16

“Orderly”

Book Excerpt: Code

By Charlotte Pence | June 30, 2020

Charlotte Pence’s first book of poems, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), received an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award from Foreword Reviews. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have recently been published in Harvard Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and Brevity. A graduate of Emerson College (M.F.A.) and the University of Tennessee (Ph.D.), she is now the director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama.

The Resentment Game

In Lee Conell’s The Party Upstairs, a father and daughter struggle to find their places in stratified Manhattan

By Sean Kinch | June 29, 2020

Martin and Ruby, the father-daughter tandem at the center of Lee Conell’s debut novel, The Party Upstairs, appear content living in the basement of an elegant New York apartment building. Over the course of a single day, however, their façades crumble, and hidden emotions explode to the surface.

A Multidimensional Narrative

Book Excerpt: Voyage of the Adventure

By John Guider | June 16, 2020

Voyage of the Adventure, a collection of photographs by John Guider documenting his 2016 journey retracing the historic route of the Donelson party, will be published in September 2020. John Guider is an Emmy Award–winning photographer and author based in Nashville.

The Resurrection Racket

W.M. Akers returns to his mythical Jazz Age New York City, where time is out of joint

By Sean Kinch | June 10, 2020

In W.M. Akers’ Westside Saints, set in an alternative version of 1920s New York, detective Gilda Carr must solve mysteries surrounding the appearance of the dead, including her late mother.

Love and Death at Sea

Lisa Alther’s Swan Song sends its grief-stricken 60-something heroine on a cruise

By Fernanda Moore | June 8, 2020

Swan Song: An Odyssey, the eighth novel by Kingsport native Lisa Alther, is a witty meditation on loss and longing in late-middle age.

1998

Book Excerpt: Greetings from New Nashville

By Steve Haruch | June 4, 2020

Greetings from New Nashville, an essay collection edited by Steve Haruch, will be published in October 2020. Contributors include Ann Patchett, Ben Folds, and Tiana Clark. Haruch is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in the Nashville Scene, The New York Times, NPR’s Code Switch, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He is currently producing a documentary film about the history of college radio.

Distant Sons

Tim Johnston
Algonquin Books
400 pages
$29

“Tim Johnston has once again raised the bar for the literary thriller. Distant Sons is elegant and edgy, refined and complex. It excavates the truth from the darkest recesses of the past and shines a light towards the possibility of a redemptive future.”

~ Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women and Sing Her Down